A while back someone here on Hacker News made a pretty insightful comment that as great of a designer as Jony Ive is, a large part of his success is owed to the fact that he had an "editor" in the form of Steve Jobs. Once Jobs passed, he no longer really had an editor.
It remains to be seen whether Sam Altman / OpenAI in general will be a good editor
This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.
I also suspect it might go that way: post-Ive designs have been credited as being better, particularly around apple's laptops that were perceived as too heavily favouring form over function.
More realistically Apple's design is good because they take the iterative approach seriously.
Jobs has been dead for almost 15 years, he's already had plenty of time to prove himself. By the time he left Apple he was known for his obsession with thinness at the cost of function (if not straight up ruining the product), such as that stupid keyboard design from the late 2010s that sucked to type on, had failure rates comparable to the Xbox 360's RRoD, and was somewhere in the ballpark of $700 to repair because the ridiculous thin construction didn't allow for individual keys to be replaced.
Why does Ive need to be churning out continuous hits? There is no shame in quitting while ahead, or considering your previous success to be a tough act to follow.
I feel similar about Zuckerberg. That guy should just let the government break up his empire, let some other people run the pieces, and retire. Otherwise he just faces humiliation and being in over his head.
But I guess ego keeps these people going.
> This is a bit of a risk for Ive, (…) If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.
He’s a billionaire approaching 60. You don’t need to worry about him, his brand, or his reputation. If he cared about it that much, he could’ve stayed at Apple. He chose to move back closer to his family. He didn’t launch a new design firm because he needed it, but because he wanted to.
>> he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success
These are two very different things. You can design a wonderful product but if there isn't a need for it in the market or your business people fail to sell it it can be a failure. Judging design based on sales makes no sense.
> This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.
What has LoveFrom produced in 6 years since Ive quit Apple?
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Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman)
I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for the purchase).
I don't think Ron Johnson is really analogous to Ive.
Ron Johnson's job where he had the most success was where he was selling fundamentally desirable and great products. I think you would have to be pretty shitty at retail to not do a good job selling iPods and iPhones. His subsequent 2 endeavors, JC Penney and Enjoy, were complete flops. It turns out selling middle-market goods is just really f'ing hard.
Ive, on the other hand, I think is pretty universally recognized as a design genius who was directly responsible for the designs of some of the most important consumer products of the past few decades. Yes, it does seem like Jobs was a critical editor that tempered the worst of Ive's "form over function" tendencies like the butterfly keyboard and removing magsafe, but I think it's fair to say there wouldn't have been an iPhone as it was originally released without Ive.
I feel like Apple still would have had a pretty similar in-store experience even if someone else besides Johnson originally launched it.
Johnson thought he was smarter than everyone else. His success at Apple reshaping the retail experience was a kind of a one-hit-wonder that he then thought would simply be a blueprint for any retail company.
He never had any success post-Apple like you say, but it wasn't because there wasn't any "insurance man". For me, I see it as a guy who found something worked smashingly, so he just assumed it would work everywhere else.
The stuff he pulled at JC Penny is a master class in what NOT to do in business:
After his success at Apple and Target, Johnson was hired as chief executive officer by JCPenney in November 2011, succeeding Mike Ullman, who had been CEO for the preceding seven years. Ullman then was chairman of the board of directors, but was relieved of his duties in January 2013. Bill Ackman, a JCPenney board member and head of hedge fund Pershing Square supported bringing in Johnson to shake up the store's stodgy image and attract new customers. Johnson was given $52.7 million when he joined JCPenney, and he made a $50 million personal investment in the company. After being hired, Johnson tapped Michael Kramer, an Apple Store veteran, as chief operating officer while firing many existing JCPenney executives.[11][12][13]
When Johnson announced his transformation vision in late January 2012, JCPenney's stock rose 24 percent to $43.[14] Johnson's actual execution, however, was described as "one of the most aggressively unsuccessful tenures in retail history". While his rebranding effort was ambitious, he was said to have "had no idea about allocating and conserving resources and core customers. He made promises neither his stores nor his cash flows would allow him to keep". Similar to what he had done at Apple, Johnson did not consider a staged roll-out, instead he "immediately rejected everything existing customers believed about the chain and stuffed it in their faces" with the first major TV ad campaign under his watch. Johnson defended his strategy, saying that "testing would have been impossible because the company needed quick results and that if he hadn’t taken a strong stance against discounting, he would not have been able to get new, stylish brands on board."[12][14]
Many of the initiatives that were successful at the Apple Stores, for instance the "thought that people would show up in stores because they were fun places to hang out, and that they would buy things listed at full-but-fair price" did not work for the JCPenney brand and ended up alienating its customers who were used to heavy discounting. By eliminating the thrill of pursuing markdowns, the "fair and square every day" pricing strategy disenfranchised JCPenney's traditional customer base.[15] Johnson himself was said "to have a disdain for JCPenney’s traditional customer base." When shoppers were not reacting positively to the disappearance of coupons and sales, Johnson did not blame the new policies. Instead, he offered the assessment that customers needed to be "educated" as to how the new pricing strategy worked. He also likened the coupons beloved by so many core shoppers as drugs that customers needed to be weaned off."[11][12][13] While head of JCPenney, Johnson continued to live in California and commuted to work in Plano, Texas by private jet several days a week.[16]
Throughout 2012, sales continued to sag dramatically. In the fourth quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, same-store sales dropped 32%, which led some to call it "the worst quarter in retail history."[17] On April 8, 2013, he was fired as the CEO of JCPenney and replaced by his predecessor, Mike Ullman.[18][19]
that's the elusive trick of "leadership" that's so hard to measure - great leaders turn talented (and even not really talented) people into success stories. Bad "leaders" can manage the most talented team of the planet into the ground.
And even people that some people decry as bad and terrible people (for example Elon Musk) still can make amazing leaders that people will willingly drop everything to go work for and who leads them on to achieve great things.
I don't think that's true. Apple Watch? Market leading product. Took something very nerdy and made it fashionable enough that people from all walks of life wear it. Got the form factor so right that even a decade later it has changed very little. Of course there were missteps in the quest for thinness with the laptops but I still preferred my Touch Bar MacBook Pro to any non-Apple laptop I've ever used. If that's the worst he did, that's still better than almost anyone else.
He's still a great designer, the problem though is that without the right kind of editorializing force he'll make mistakes, usually in the form of compromising practicality and functionality for the sake of aesthetics. I should probably clarify that this isn't some fault unique to Jony Ive. It feels like it's common among designers and probably just creative people in general.
Except that freezes Jony in time, as if he didn’t work alongside that editor for decades. I think Jony, like any of us, evolves and picks up new tricks. I’m excited to see what he creates.
I’m optimistic for this partnership and I hope you’re right.
But Ive post-jobs just doesn’t have the same track record. He’s had a few years, maybe he’s learned and matured. I hope so.
> I think Jony, like any of us, evolves and picks up new tricks. I’m excited to see what he creates.
He's had 6 years to create something—anything!—so far
Given how messy the model names are and some of the failures like 'GPTs' I get the sense that he's pretty hands-off and mostly focuses on picking the people and then letting them do what they want. Maybe that'll work with Ive, maybe not.
Altman clearly has vision and a sense for where the puck is going with AI, but being a design editor is something else entirely
Altman is a new era conman, he does not have any vision whatsoever.
He's very good at doing startup/scaleup management, in a ruthless/snakey skill level. I think that's something everyone can agree.
But vision? I'm not so sure, he had great company and help along the way, and now that he has been left alone (arguably due to his own actions) he's selling the image of competence in areas that he hasn't demonstrated skills whatsoever. We'll see.
Clearly? I don’t think that’s certain at all.
For me, OpenAI's venture into AI adjacent things (Windsurf, JI's company), is a signal that they are no longer seriously pursuing AGI.
How so? I don’t believe that Ive is going along with the purchase.
No? It's not a acqui-hire? The article says "joining forces with the legendary designer to make a push into hardware."
Nobody says what kind of hardware. A wearable is the likely bet. Maybe a home robot, but that's a few years out.
OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple’s iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT.
..
OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition.
..
OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.”
https://apnews.com/article/jony-ive-openai-chatgpt-52c72786e...
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Ive doesn’t seem to have come from an especially privileged background (beyond the obvious good fortune of being a white guy in good health born in a developed English-speaking country in the post-war era etc.) Middle-class certainly, but not markedly upper-middle-class or a posh boy. Though I suppose I’m in danger of sounding like pg talking about the Collisons as if they were poor boys made good.
It's been <20y since YouTube was acquired for $1B, which felt like an imaginary valuation at the time, but it was for a company that actually had traction with users.
Inflation-adjusted, this acquisition is worth 4x that for… vibes from a guy who led a famous team a long time ago?
Same conclusion I got. This is weird as fuck. They seem kinda desperate.
Money isn't real anymore.
Money is real. Privately held company valuations are not. This is an all-stock deal, so what it's "worth" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Its value rises and falls based on how long the hype train can keep running, or how much they can offload to Mayasoshi Son and Arab Gulf sovereign funds.
Money is very, very, real for people below the poverty line.
Vibe codin-... acquiring?
vibe acquiring could be the new term - quick! Write a blog about!
Money is a social construct
Just need a way to talk to ChatGPT anytime. Microphone, speaker and permanent connection to ChatGPT. That’s all you need: io
One need is being able to talk to ChatGPT in a whisper or silent voice… so you can do it in public. I don’t think that comes from them, but it will be big when it does. Much easier than brain implants! In an ear device, you need enough data of listening to the muscles and the sounds together, then you can just listen to the muscles…
I assume they want to have their own OS that is, essentially, their models in the cloud.
so, here are my specific predictions
1. Subvocalization-sensing earbuds that detect "silent speech" through jaw/ear canal muscle movements (silently talk to AI anytime)
2. An AI OS laptop — the model is the interface
3. A minimal pocket device where most AI OS happens in the cloud
4. an energy efficient chip that runs powerful local AI, to put in any physical object
5. … like a clip. Something that attaches to clothes.
6. a perfect flat glass tablet like in the movies (I hope not)
7. ambient intelligent awareness through household objects with microphones, sensors, speakers, screens —
The form factor that suggests is an AR headset. Google, Meta, and others have those. They're all flops. Too bulky.
Carmack has said that for VR/AR to get any traction, the headgear needs to come down to swim goggle size, and to go mainstream, it has to come down to eyeglass size. He's probably right. Ive would be the kind of guy to push in that direction.
> Carmack has said that for VR/AR to get any traction, the headgear needs to come down to swim goggle size, and to go mainstream, it has to come down to eyeglass size. He's probably right. Ive would be the kind of guy to push in that direction.
I agree with the first 2 sentences, but not the last. Everyone and their grandmother knows size and bulkiness are big blockers to VR/AR adoption. But the reason we don't have an Apple Vision Pro in an eyeglasses form factor isn't an issue of design, it's an issue of physics.
Meta seems to have decent success with their Ray Bans, which can basically do all the "ask AI" use cases, but true VR/AR fundamentally require much bulkier devices, most of all for battery life.
I can't imagine that Jony Ive built a more advanced AR headset than Meta, Apple and all the others in two years.
It's a technical problem right, not design? Make it smaller, make it sexier!
> 5. … like a clip. Something that attaches to clothes.
I feel like the most natural thing would be basically push-to-talk-to-AI:
1. Some sort of mic + earpiece that you can wear comfortably(e.g. airpods)
2. A wireless button that you can put on a ring to activate the mic in the most ergonomic way possible
3. Any time you press the button, everything you say gets sent to a running AI chat
That's genius!
Like a pin. With AI. And it would talk to you like a human, so we could call it the Humane AI Pin.
How did nobody thought about that?
I’ve been using #5 for a few weeks now (Limitless.ai pendant, clips to clothes, records and transcribes everything all day)
It sounds cool, and the idea of asking questions about your day seems like it would be cool, but a few weeks later I’m finding myself forgetting to take it with me. The value just isn’t there yet. (And why have a clip on microphone when everyone already has a microphone in our pocket?)
It’s a cool toy though. Also a creepy toy since it can double as an eavesdropping device.
I have a feeling these AI companies will fall back to selling our data for advertising purposes once these companies realize their core products aren’t valuable enough for consumers to want to pay for the cost of it.
(Co-founder & CEO of Limitless) Thanks for trying it and I hope to win you back with the new features we have in the works!
As for selling data if consumers don’t want to pay for it: I commit publicly to never doing this. I will shutdown the company and return remaining capital to investors if consumers don’t want to pay for what we are building. So far, so good, and we were actually cash flow positive a few of the last few weeks.
How does that work socially, is everyone just fine with their conversations with you being recorded? or do you just not mention it.
>Just need a way to talk to ChatGPT anytime. Microphone, speaker and permanent connection to ChatGPT. That’s all you need
So like a smartphone in your pocket connected to an earphone.
The whisper thing is nice. Sounds like a feature for next gen earphones.
> The whisper thing is nice
Amazon Alexa already has this (albeit you need to whisper loud enough for it to hear), and replies in a whisper. It works with any earbuds, but is kinda useless until Alexa+ (LLM integration) is more widely available; and it would be nice to have it reply in a normal voice when using earbuds.
Silent speech recognition is already a thing [0], so pairing it up with an LLM would be straightforward.
Don’t bone conduction microphones already exist for this?
What exact use cases do I get from being able to talk to chatGPT when I am out in public? I can think of close to 0 value add to have an AI voice in my head when I'm taking a walk in the park or out to dinner.
People stare at their phones while walking, having dinner, and driving. It's not a big leap to imagine replacing that with subvocal conversations with AI.
A friend of mine is constantly asking it questions everytime something comes up. She opens her phone, loads the app, hits the mic button, then listens with the phone to her ear. Would work a lot better as some sort of device.
I’m as much of a deep Ai skeptic as anyone but I can definitely think of use cases for while driving or walking, like asking questions about my own schedule or what people have emailed or asked me for in the last hour, or where I can get something specific to eat nearby and so on.
Not sure it’s worth the hype but there are use cases. I do think it’s an interesting contrast with crypto, where there aren’t really.
Executive function assistance.
I'll set alerts, an alarm, write on my hand, etc. and still forget that e.g. my kids have a half-day tomorrow… even when medicated.
I'd love to have a little voice in my head periodically reminding me of these things.
when i think of them, i just call 1-800-chat-gpt
On a dedicated device no less…what’s the point?! You have a phone.
You can participate in more highly intelligent discussions, great for a dinner party or a date or an interview. Everywhere you go you can know it all, many use cases. The people who don’t do it, will be at a severe disadvantage.
There was a guy at MIT who made a silent headset a few years ago. It didn't use brainwaves but rather measured electrical activity in the facial muscles. Apparently when you think in words, there's a slight activation of the same muscles you use to speak.
You want something like this. A sticker placed on your neck that reads the movement of your neck muscles and infers speech.
https://samueli.ucla.edu/speaking-without-vocal-cords-thanks...
No sticker required: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10411110
Apple has a patent on #1: https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
More accurately, they have a patent on one method for achieving #1.
I was thinking about this problem once and I thought of some sensor to pick up your finger making typing movements but your hands can be in any orientation, i.e. suspended in the air at your sides as you walk.
I use mic input with the chat gpt app in public all the time, if you use a low whisper voice and hold the phone close you can be basically inaudible more than 3 feet away and the TTS still does a great job.
The real challenge, though, is going to be trust and usability. Always-on AI devices listening to whispers, watching context… that’s a privacy tightrope
Here is this vengeful looking, four legged, half bear sized wild cat before me, tell it to turn around and look for a squirrel instead!
Would love to chat more about this with you if you'd be interested!
Sure, hit me up at dereklomas@gmail.com
Yeah this is exactly why I use Grok so much and barely use ChatGPT at all. I always have a device with X on it and it's easy to pop open Grok from anywhere on the site no matter what you're doing as the button is already there.
thanks for the list. it's brilliant.
I can't but wonder though... are we slave to productivity?
What do we need this omnipresent help? I'm sure some people do. If you're CEO of a large company, if you are a doctor seeing hundreds of patients in a week, etc.
But me? An average middle age guy with 9-5 job doing white collar job at healthcare company?
I enjoy doing some things that are 'inefficient'. Is that a really a problem?
Remember hanging out at the pub 20+ years ago? A discussion on who the fastest was, or something (literally what started the Guinness Book of Records) and it would run for a decent time as people mentioned who they thought it was, stories, hearsay evidence.
Now you just whip out your phone, look it up or ask an AI, get the answer and move on.
The second is more informative in a way, but so boring.
The point wasn’t knowing the fact, it was the discussion!
>That’s all you need.
No. They need all the data from your life.
They need to see what you see (camera somewhere), hear what you hear (hello microphones) and probably even more.
My bet is on some sort of tablet. Maybe kind of a book, or kindle, or something like that.
A bodycam rather
So does openai know how to widen the context window without it taking more money? Otherwise Google wins, again. And this is all boring. Gemini 2.5 pro preview where you can just insert all files you have and actually it doesn't compress and has it in memory is just what you want. All the compression tricks etc really are shit compared. 32k input tokens is a joke now once you tried this.
As in bearish on openai if they don't offer cheaper 10m context soonish. Google will.
I agree we are watching the turning point.
If raw AI power is the key, Google seems to be in pole position form here on out. They can make their own TPUs, have their own data center. No need to "Stargate" with Oracle and Softbank in tow. Google also has Android, YouTube and G-Suite.
However, OpenAI has been going down the product route for a few years now. After a spout of high-profile research exits it is clear Altman has purged the ranks and can now focus on product development.
So if product is a sufficient USP, and if Altman can deliver a better product, they still have a chance. I guess that is where Ive comes into picture. And Google is notoriously bad at product that is internally developed.
A lot of ifs there. When judging how likely Altman would be to deliver a better product, what other product has he delivered besides an orb that scans your eyeballs in exchange for crypto?
Full attention to 1M context is nonsense. Yes, Gemini can do needle-in-haystack, but do you actually need to feed 1M tokens to find one thing? People who have a lot of experience with using LLM for code generation claim that performance degrades past certain point, even if all context is somewhat-relevant.
What we need is not "long context", we need memory: ability for LLM to address datasets of arbitrary size.
RAG has bad reputation but there's a myriad of different ways for doing RAG. Say, "agentic" tool calls which fetch specific data is essentially a form of RAG. But it's cool because it's not called RAG, right?
Anyway, this definitely requires some innovation, but I doubt "longer context" is exactly what we need.
Our company has development documents, guidelines, api's going back almost 20 years. If you follow them, life is good, if you don't, things don't work. The 20 years is relevant because this is a lot of text + code. When we give this to o3, o4-mini, claude 3.5/7 it just ignores rules randomly; when we give it to gemini 2.5 pro preview, it just works. And after prompting multiple times in chat, the other models just start going into complete nonsense land. We often have cases where it even starts generating code in python while we were working in TS; apparently it compressed it's context so much it forget the actual basics? Not gemini. Haven't been able to mess it up in any practical case yet, which is why, maybe erroneously, attributed that to the context.
Yeah Google has it all vertically integrated from the science to the chips and everything in between. It’s theirs to lose.
They’re doing a great job losing it so far.
The real question is who gets to "good enough" memory for cheap first - and whether they can do it without hallucinating or degrading performance
4.1 in api already provides 1 million tokens. Anthropic’s enterprise version does too. I’m not sure if this is a software or a hardware (computer) problem.
bingo. chatgpt does some summarization/memory thing recently. It's meh tbh.
Buying a company without a product (or anything announced), without a website, with its founder not even joining after an acquisition. So, not really an aquihire either.
I am sure this aligns with the non-profit part of OpenAI whose board allegedly has influence of where the company is heading.
This industry is amazing.
> with its founder not even joining after an acquisition. So, not really an aquihire either.
What do you mean?
> Sir Jony Ive will “assume deep design and creative responsibilities” to build new products for OpenAI
> Ive won’t be joining OpenAI, and his design firm, LoveFrom, will continue to be independent, but they will “take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software,” in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion
Sounds like OpenAI is basically just becoming a client of LoveFrom, Ive's design firm.
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From the same people that brought you "Vibe Coding", comes "Vibe Acquisitions".
Vibes goeth before a fall.
What the other commenters are forgetting is that this is the same Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast.
This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.
How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit? - Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion. - Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted. - And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.
> Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast
Relevant thread where Sam acknowledges the plan.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
it’s not true, contemporaneous accounts disprove it (although that’s not to say Sam Altman is not a snake, Sam Altman is a snake that nobody should trust)
> Other than that, child's play for me.
Such an insufferable response.
whoa!!
Posted by former CEO Yishan Wong, no less.
Am I the only one who read samaltman's comment as obvious sarcasm?
What the fuck
Sam also ran a crypto scam called WorldCoin. Their secret sauce was tricking poor people in Africa.
Runs, I think. WorldCoin is still around, just re-branded as 'World Network'. I didn't spot the usual leadership bios on a quick search.
Growing up in a strong Southern Christian / Baptist / Pentecostal household [1], WorldCoin feels like the most "Mark of the Beast" plot I've ever seen. 1990's televangelists like John Hagee and Pat Robertson would be screaming to high heaven about Sam Altman being the antichrist if they were still around.
Transacting with your eyeball? Directly out of the Book of Revelations!
[1] I took a strong interest in biochemistry in college and I'm no longer religious.
How did they trick them by giving them free money?
That is interesting given that reddit has gone from a cultural powerhouse to something most people talk about shamefully, if at all.
>something most people talk about shamefully, if at all
Only if you go there for rage bait content.
Small subs are better than ever. And no Lemmy is not an alternative.
It has gone from a cultural powerhouse for a niche audience to something most people talk about.
Culture powerhouse? Lol, for nerds maybe. I'm pretty sure most of my non tech friends have never visited the site.
The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere. Anecdata, but still. In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram, and I think most ordinary people hold that same view.
Really? My perception (and their metrics seem to back this up) is that “normal people” are really on Reddit now. It’s the #7 most visited site in the world. It exploded during the pandemic - not just a site for internet nerds anymore.
My understanding is that there are two types of stock, and the non profit controls the voting stock majority. This cannot be diluted. All other stock gives a (capped) fraction of the profits. This cannot be diluted by these operations, but the cap also can be a bad deal.
This is news to me. Do you have any reference for this? FWIW they did a restructuring that got rid of the capped-profit regime very recently.
That's an interesting point about the different stock classes and voting rights. It adds another layer to how these kinds of acquisitions and valuations might play out in the long run, especially concerning the non-profit's influence. How often are such dual-class stock structures truly effective in maintaining the original mission when large sums and external valuations come into play?
This is 100% definitely how it works. The number of board seats the non-profit gets is not dependent on how many outstanding shares there are.
One of the most informative posts here. I thought that since Altman's coup the no profit status wouldn't be a problem.
It's interesting I posted exactly this hypothesis an hour or so ago and immediately got flagged despite not being manifestly offensive or anything. Very suspicious.
Who actually did the purchasing, the non-profit or the for-profit? They have similar names (OpenAI Inc vs OpenAI LLC), and the article isn't clear.
Did the non-profit buy io using shares of the for-profit that it owns? Or did the for-profit buy io using its own shares?
I want to know why a burner account posted this comment. There could be many reasons, some more entertaining than others. Of course the answer could be boring, but do you care to elaborate?
All that YC/VC experience paid off, they're the masters of gutting things from the inside out in the name of growth.
Man, I remember the absolute hysteria here over the non-profit trying to reign Altman in. You'd have thought they were murdering babies.
I agree with your analysis, but it's hilarious that it's now top-voted, when the sentiment was so negative when the board saw the same thing coming ages ago.
> This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals
I'll add that conventional finance wisdom says that you should only buy companies using stock when you believe your stock is overvalued. That way you get more bang for your buck than cash or undervalued stock.
I have a feeling OpenAI will eventually be looked back on as the company that forced Google to release its internal AI product and then died a slow death.
But can they transition from being "the lab that shocked the world" to a sustainable product company in a hyper-competitive space?
I would be very, very surprised if any of the players in this space can make anything sustainable.
First Windsurf and now this. OpenAI is spending billions like there's nothing else to use this money for while being seemingly cash strapped for model training since they already signaled more investment rounds would be needed to remain competitive. They're trying to become too big to fail before they have a moat which won't work well.
They've already claimed that there will be no "GPT-5" LLM, and that instead what they want to call "GPT-5" is a fusion of their various models like 4o, dalle, their video model, etc. That in and of itself is a move that makes it quite clear to me they've hit a wall on the intelligence side.
Add these purchases, and it seems like they are extremely desperate.
Models are getting smaller, faster, cheaper to make, reflecting on their own output, adding modes and running in more places. But they’re not getting much smarter because they can only be as smart as us and each other, because that’s where their training comes from. OpenAI is strongest in a world where models cost billions to train. A world filled with cheap open source models is their worst nightmare. This is what’s happening. So they have to pivot into being a product company and away from being a model company.
Userbase and customer relationships are valuable. If someone else creates GPT5, but doesn't have a large user base, then OpenAI the company could buy that invention. Or, as we saw with deepseek in January, fast-follow with a comparable model within a reasonable amount of time.
Brands have value. If someone has logged into ChatGPT for two years daily, they have built a habit. That habit certainly can be disrupted, but there's a level of inertia and barrier -- something else has to be 10x better and not just 2x better.
When DeepSeek came out, I tried it out but didn't fundamentally switch my habit. OpenAI + Claude + Gemini instead caught up.
There is a space to make a suite of products that synergize entirely. Glasses, watches, buttons, clothes (yes, clothes), and home devices/computers/tvs. The reason they are in a spearhead position is because unlike like Google and Apple, they don't need to maintain a legacy paradigm. They don't have to introduce new tech and make it work with old tech, while also maintaining usability familiarity (e.g You can't just change iOS and Android).
They take zero risk while attacking user fatigue (people just get bored of stuff). The current leaders take all the risk following OpenAI because everyone will complain about the changes no matter what they do, and just come up with a reason to switch. This is a human phenomenon that is truly fucked up, the same as when a partner in a relationship is ready to move on no matter what you do.
More like they see the future as more multi-modal, and they're probably right to think that is the best value approach vs. throwing more money at large language models.
I'm not so sure it's desperation. As an alternative hypothesis, we might simply view it as an attempt from a temporary position of strength to secure their tremendous lead as the primary consumer access point to intelligence. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to suggest that this is one of the most important open questions at the moment -- one which will likely be relatively winner-takes-all (in contrast to the more commoditized B2B/API side) and where the winner likely won't be decided based on the intelligence side alone. The questions also aren't entirely separate since the winner, here, will have such incomparably valuable usage data...
Unlike most successful startups, OpenAI is not faced with the possibility that the giants (Apple, Google, Microsoft) decide to look their way, but the reality that these are their real competitors and that the stakes are existential for many of them (trends indicating a shift away from search etc). The most likely outcome remains that one if not all of the giants eventually manage to produce a halfway-decent product experience that reduces OpenAI to a B2B player.
I don't think your conclusion of "hitting the wall on intelligence" is warranted.
It makes more sense to believe that scaling has hit the wall on available text data to train on, and that to continue scaling, along with whatever emergent properties arise they need much more data than exists as text.
There are orders of magnitude more data as video, audio, and images and this is what they intend to use to continue scaling.
> and that what they want to call "GPT-5" is a fusion of their various models like 4o, dalle...
Do you have a source? I ask because I read the opposite.
From the article 5 billion of the payment is equity in OpenAI. So they aren't spending cash
This still means 1.5B were paid in cash for a company from what I understood has neither clients nor even a product. Not exactly pocket money.
Honestly I think it's a great move if you know you have a hyped up valuation, to exchange that paper valuation for actual company acquisitions. Not every company has that ability.
I have a gut feeling alot of this is going to go negative for OpenAI. I simply don't see what they're going to produce in a reasonable amount of time that justifies hardware, for example.
I'm open to being wrong, very open, but I need to see evidence. Hard evidence.
What else are they going to do with all that money?
Raise billions and billions under the guise of AGI coming tomorrow and they just become a too big to fail company gobbling up any competition.
You don't hear anyone touting AGI anymore do we?
> You don't hear anyone touting AGI anymore do we?
Apart from, y'know, DeepMind - remember those guys? The ones with the SOTA models at the top of the leaderboards? The ones who just launched Veo3 and blew everyone away?
It feels like OpenAI has kinda jumped-the-shark at this stage. They don't seem to be especially competitive any more, and all the news coming out of them is tinkering at the edges or acquisitions that no-one really cares about.
When are they going to start competing on actual AI again?
Well, Windsurf is no longer worth what they paid for it. Let's see how the rest goes.
Just to stem pointless debates before they flame up - both these acquisitions appear to be primarily if not exclusively for stock.
Sure, if you want to get into theoretical finance, OpenAI could have sold these new shares for cash, so technically there's no difference, but OpenAI is only spending opportunity cost cash, rather than fiat.
OpenAI's fiat likely still goes to the things you'd expect, like training models and paying for inference.
The AI hype seems driven more by stock valuations than genuine productivity gains.
Developers now spend excessive time crafting prompts and managing AI generated pull requests :-) tasks that a simple email to a junior coder could have handled efficiently. We need a study that shows the lost productivity.
When CEOs aggressively promote such tech solutions, it signals we're deep into bubble territory:
“If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is — it’s possible that most developers are not coding.”
- Matt Garman – CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) - June 2024
- Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque - 2023
- Satya Nadella – CEO of Microsoft - April 2025
- Jensen Huang CEO, NVIDIA - Feb 2024
- OpenAI's CPO Kevin Weil - March 2025
- Mark Zuckerberg - Jan 2025
- Dario Amodei - Anthropic CEO - March 2025Staff are not cheap either. 300k cash salary for most of them from what I hear. Plus 600 to 1M in funny money.
One explanation:
The models will not be a moat, but the products can be. More specifically "sticky" products / killer apps like ChatGPT, and whatever forthcoming products this acquisition of Jony Ive's company may lead to.
Windsurf acquisition may be explained in part by the same logic of owning a strong and sticky product, as well as a good source of data for training.
It doesn't look like they're cash-strapped, more like they want to raise stakes.
To play in the same league as Google and Microsoft you have to be big. So they need to increase enterprise value to be taken seriously.
That's what investors expect them to do.
The only other option is to close it down, as OpenAI would quickly become obsolete if they can no longer produce frontier models.
As for the moat, it's not something you can just conjure, right? Perhaps the whole point of these acquisition is to create a moat, but only time will tell if that worked.
Clearly foundation models don’t make money or a viable business on their own
You can say the same about any piece of software...
In what way can the be too big to fail? Who will be forced to bail them out and why?
Don't forget their Abilene chip factory.
Wasnt this all stock deal tho?
Meh, all stock deal. They are not spending any raised cash on this.
And nobody on this forum uses his brain to find out what’s going on ..
> At io, the group set out to develop, engineer and manufacturer a collection of products for an era of artificial general intelligence — the point when technology achieves humanlike cognitive abilities.
And everyone cringed.
This is the only play for OpenAI. The AI service is going to be commoditized very very quickly and their moat will be gone. They will be doing vertical integration and push into everything. If people complained apple and google looked at apps and copied the functionality themselves what OpenAI will do will be much worse. Also when it took apple and google years to do it, OpenAI will do it very very quickly, in a year most
The other play is they build chatgpt.com into a destination. Two major data points to this: [1] Over 400M weekly actives, and [2] recent reports that chatgpt will be adding X.com / social network style features
Also known as “getting into the advertisement business”
Their technical moat is already gone.
Their remaining moat is basically captured developer mindshare/inertia. That is important, but given how easy it is to swap out back-end models, and how good other models are - ultimately cost is going to win. And it's currently a race to the bottom in pricing.
> In the interview, Altman said Jobs would be “damn proud” of Ive’s latest move.
What an extremely weird (and egotistical) thing to say if you're in Altman's position
It’s a trophy acqui-hire. Something to brag about over dinner and to investors.
so Altman's nerd-equivalent of a sexual conquest?
Narcissistic ego stroking. He literally is invoking and thinking out loud for a dead man, who was not that intimate with him, just to validate his own ventures and acquihires. Very weird.
It wouldn't be that weird if Ive had said so himself.
> It wouldn't be that weird if Ive had said so himself.
It would still be marketing, though.
… Unless he engineered the entire deal himself and wanted to make it seem like it was Ive’s greatest maneuver.
If Ive has the social intelligence of a child, I guess that's plausible.
And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And Ive and Sama were the sixth day.
While Sam is being egotistic, the reverence of Jobs to the point nobody is even allowed to assume how he would have thought is also weird imho.
I'm certainly not saying that "nobody is even allowed to assume how he would have thought". What I'm saying actually has very little to do with Jobs at all.
I'm saying that as a new partner to someone, it's extremely weird to say that your old dead partner would be extremely proud you teamed up with me. If I were to marry a woman who lost her husband, it would be extremely weird and egotistical for me to tell people that her dead ex-husband would be "damn proud" that she married me.
If Ive had said that himself, it wouldn't be weird. But Sama didn't know Jobs well enough to put words in his mouth.
Jony Ive is a nobody without Steve Jobs.
After Jobs passed he never produced anything of any value, he almost destroyed Macbooks.
That's probably overstating it; it is definitely true that his redesign of iOS 7 (2013) was truly awful - he really should not have been anywhere near software, and was able to take advantage of Scott Forstall's then bad reputation and recent dismissal to insert himself in an area he had no real qualifications for. Before that, he was purely a hardware guy and it was clear from the outset he was in over his head with software. Apparently he had no idea what 'HCI' (human computer interaction) even meant; wasn't even familiar with the abbreviation itself. Now with the benefit of hindsight, we can judge that iOS 7 had some truly terrible design decisions that ended up making the iPhone much harder to use (very light, unbolded text everywhere, removal of borders on everything especially buttons, over use of color tints on text).
What I always found crazy was that Ive seemed to just take design ideas from then Windows 8 and Windows Phone more than trying to create his own thing. It showed that he had no original ideas of his own; even just iteratively improving on iOS 6 would've been better.
On Mac hardware, he definitely needed some sort of editor to stay his hand post Jobs. The era of crappy butterfly Macbook keyboards is still something I remember that was clearly his responsibility, driven by obsession on thinness and it seemed for a while that Apple was in denial about the issue.
Still, the Apple Watch is a definite hit for Apple now and it's clearly his baby, so his legacy isn't all bad.
Apple Watch got better after he left.
Apple Watch was and is a huge hit.
The AW became a huge hit in spite of Ive wanting it to be a fashion item. Remember the $10k versions? The version of the AW that everyone has and loves is not the Ive version.
One could argue Apple Watch has just been coasting on iPhones’ coat tails. People with an iPhone want a watch with similar aesthetics and in the same ecosystem.
If a non-Apple company launched an identical watch at the same time it would have gone nowhere.
It’s mind boggling how much money is floating around once you are part of the insider circle. What has that company been doing to be worth 6.5 billion?
I consider myself extremely plugged in to what's going on with AI and I still couldn't tell you what Ive's company does without looking it up
Maybe the company is inconsequential and this is just about hiring Ive?
Do they even have a website?
I looked it up, still no idea what his company does.
> It’s mind boggling how much money is floating around once you are part of the insider circle.
it's a big club and you ain't in it [1]
They made a very pretty font.
that is more useful than more or less anything else that AI has practically achieved
I think of it in terms of Vegas-style casinos or cruise ships. About $2B for a casino, $1B for a cruise ship.
So imagine Johny Ives to be worth a couple of cruise ships tied up outside 2 hulking casinos.
I am utterly confused. If AGI is around the corner, this means that the economy is going to be destroyed and money are going to lose their meaning. Who is going to buy your AI gadget? Why spend money on that and Windsurf?
I've made this point many times and the only possible answers are:
1. The people promising AGI are lying 2. The people promising AGI don't know what they're saying 3. The people promising AGI are hedging against AGI not eventuating but some intermediate value emerging. This is the most charitable read, but also totally at odds with getting people to invest, since the investment is predicated on AGI achievement
The correct answer is almost certainly "some people are silly, some people are grifting, some people think AGI is coming, but all the investment certainly benefits from people conflating AGI with a very good product instead of a world-changing achievement".
Eric Schmidt imagining AGI and then speculating that people will like, still be churning out apps, as if humans will need to do that sort of menial labour, just blew my mind and made me question many of the stories I had heard about his intelligence.
And Honest Zuck talking how his AGI is going to specialize in ads and entertainment. To whom are you going to sell ads…
I dunno - I am rather thinking that they are hedging.
That's not really what AGI means. The economy will tremendously grow from AGI, it just won't necessarily involve people anymore.
The means of production - yes. But to have a working economy I suspect you have to have a matching consumption. Not sure how this works without involving people.
And who needs Jony Ive? The AGI can design the devices. It surely will know best?
If AGI is around the corner why are people leaving openai ? Why is openai diversifying ? &c.
The economy isn't going to be destroyed even if AGI were round the corner.
Interesting - how do you reconcile mass unemployment with working economy? (And this is honest question from one that is invested and hopeful that their life savings won’t evaporate overnight)
interesting back door way to get sam altman some equity in openAI.
I wonder how much of this is downstream from them not being able to convert to a for profit and giving sam a slug of equity
How does that work?
The company oAI is acquiring is owned by Sam Altman and Johnny Iive
No question that Ive is a legend, but I do think the fall of Humane (also ex-Apple) and the challenges at Meta, Apple, and Google in terms of VR/AR adoption (Meta Ray Ban, Apple Vision, Google Glasses and the new thing) are instructive here. The $6.5B almost feels like the largest ever aquihire.
> No question that Ive is a legend
Not sure why he deserves to be a legend, to be honest, but yes, he is a legend.
He did a good job, but those small and minimalistic designs were only possible because of the efforts of entire teams of engineers, of which the public never heard anything.
And many of those designs were made at Ive's behest, against the wishes of entire teams of engineers. I feel like we have his "courage" to blame for the Butterfly keyboard, terrible Mac thermals and the lack of ports on "Pro" computers.
I absolutely despise comments like these, and you only see them on HN.
It's like saying great architects aren't great, it's the construction workers who should get the credit.
"The takeover of io will provide OpenAI with about 55 hardware engineers, software developers and manufacturing experts"
6.5B / 55 = $118 million per engineer
not a cheap aquihire
Who now expect to be paid.
To quote from the article regarding Humane and the Rabbit r1 personal assistant device: “Those were very poor products,” said Ive, 58. “There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.”
To quote myself: "Jony Ive made incredibly poor products his last years at Apple" - So his opinion of what constitutes a "poor product" is suspect (R1 and Humane were bad products but just because you can tell what is a bad product doesn't mean you can make a good one).
They were not thin enough.
This is the same dude who brought us the butterfly keyboard, so I'm anticipating a form-beating-function failure (if they actually ship something).
It's also the same dude who brought us beloved products in Apple's lineup. It's almost a meme at this point to say that Jony Ive's genius needs a containing force like Steve Jobs. Perhaps Sam Altman can fill that role.
Agreed. It's hard to think of a new product category for smart devices ... unless maybe Smart HATS! OK folks so remember where you heard it first - ultra stylish head gear with flip-down visor screen anyone?
Even as a joke that's still just a goofier version of smart glasses. There really is nothing new under the sun.
Eye contacts that have a HUD could be cool. But that’s not really something you need someone like Ive for.
Humane was very impressive product from hardware perspective and design but poor execution and software (partially because they don't own smartphone os like android/iOS).
If similar hardware was:
- released by apple or google and deeply integrated with android/iOS
- embedded inside apple watch / pixel watch
- embedded inside slim airpods case that could be wear as pendant
- apple had siri as good as gemini and very good local STT to reduce latency
- MCP clients got more adopted by integrated in smartphones AI assistants
then it could be a hit. They lost because they shipped to early, without having big pockets for long game, without owning android OS / iOS and charged big price + subscription for this gadgets.
I think google currently is the best positioned to pull seamless experience with pixel devices (smartphone, watch, buds, gemini)
But Meta is thriving with Meta Ray Bans, they have sold over 2M as of few months back. (Yes I know that number seems small compared to other devices, but for a new form factor, that seems like a great early success)
It take a special kind of person to think, yeah, I'll wear a live camera and microphone connected to Facebook...
Where is they AR/VR part in the Ray Bans?
It’s cameras, speakers, microphones but no display.
Meta Ray Bans and Googles Project Aura are products that I absolutely want, but absolutely don't want to buy them from either of those companies, or any company as invasive as they are.
It's long past time for enhanced privacy regulation in the North American market because these products are going to be wildly invasive as people depend on them to mediate their experience with the world. I don't know what the right answer, and I am very much aware that building products like these that don't focus on monetizing user interaction and advertising would likely mean that they are priced out for lower income users, but I hope someone smarter than me can figure it out :S
That's how I read the article and came to find your comments. AI bought a human.
[dead]
From April:
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/07/openai-reportedly-mulls-bu...
> OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products.
How the heck did the price go up 13x?
Because it sounds like the CEO of OpenAI wants to use investor's money to buy his other company.
Too bad we can't short it or otherwise stop it, because investment for the things we could start will dry up once the world figures this out. We're all correlated to companies like FTX whether we like them or not...
Sam and Elon are both ethically dubious power players who seem to be really good at inside dealing to benefit themselves, while all the other people in their companies just have to deal with it.
As I write this out, it reminds me of another polarizing leader who has been really good at being in the news every day for the last 6 months, and for a 4 year period a decade ago.
There should be a way to reverse valuate a company based on how much of its stock it used to acquire a company worth (500,000,000 dollars of) peanuts
[flagged]
Yeah of course we cannot short a non-public company.
If we could, then forget OpenAI. I would short every private company and end up richer than Elon Musk because 99% of the private companies fail.
“Wanting to short a private company” is such a weird comeback. Like yeah private companies most likely fail. Everyone knows.
Perhaps this is a way to channel money into someone's pocket, instead of keeping it in a non-profit?
They don't call him Scam Altman for no reason.
> How the heck did the price go up 13x?
Because they’re not paying with money. It’s $6.5B of pure equity in a private company that they’ve decided to value at $300B based off of… vibes or hopes or whatever?
hey if Tesla is worth $1T OpenAI might be 10x undervalued at $300B :)
There's only one Jony Ive and alot of demand from the company with the deepest pockets in town ...
UX will make or break any major new AI product - especially hardware. The price is steep but I think it's actually a sensible move. There really aren't that many other people with the proven ability to deliver when it comes to UX at scale for novel areas.
Jony Ive is a designer verses Tony Fadell who is a hardware guy.
Ive is a very talented artist but AI is not being held back by people unwilling to courageously make things thinner and thinner.
I would imagine Ive looked at an Apple HomePod and thought “we could make this beautifully flat and hang it on the wall of every room in the house”. This might be a good idea but it in no way solves the major problems with AI/LLMs.
The same guy who designed the 2016 generation MacBooks and was kicked out of Apple over it?
Jony Ive is great at UX when someone like Steve Jobs is there to veto stupid ideas.
The first step in AI delivering a good UX might be coming up with a logo that doesn't look like a butthole. Unfortunately this seems to be an impossible task.
Only in silicon valley would $6,500,000,000 for a single designer seem like a sensible move...
This announcement furthers my sense OpenAI is becoming a hype vehicle destined to be the iconic poster child of early AI hubris when the bubble pops. When I read the pretentious marketing copy and photo on the announcement page my first thought was "Someday this'll be linked on the Wikipedia page for 'The AI Bubble'".
I'm not even a hardcore AI skeptic, I think AI can be useful and valuable in the near-term (even outside coding!) and potentially transformative in the long-term but I also think current capabilities are over-hyped and wildly overvalued. I think AI is going through the typical hype cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle) and we're currently late in the "Inflated Expectations" phase soon to be followed by the inevitable "Trough of Disillusionment".
Wow Sam Altman is so full of himself... I would never want to work for this narcist. Just watch this video. https://x.com/sama/status/1925242282523103408
I thought this was going to be some hit-piece tweet then I saw it was a tweet from Sam Altman himself. That video... Wow. I got in 2min before I had to stop. I thought you might be over-exaggerated but full of /themselves/ doesn't even begin to describe it.
Ship something, then you can create a video like that, not before.
this is designed to appeal directly to a certain kind of self-mythologizing Bay Area techie, the kind that was common in the early 2010s. It’s meant to signal continuity, “we’re just like you, we loved Steve Jobs”
apparently it worked on some people: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/21/sam-and-jony-io
> It conveys grand ambition, but without pretension.
Indeed, "greatest in the world" lack of pretension
John Gruber would shoot Jony Ive's fecal matter into his veins if he could.
I tried but it was too much, first I thought it was a spoof, then perhaps AI generated and then couldn't watch no more!
I agree the first minute or two of this was very cringe. I stuck with it though and it reminded me very much of the kind of talk that was common in the late '00s tech scene. Sort of nice to see that kind of optimism again.
Unless OpenAI is going to also buy a robotics company and Ive is there to design the robot exterior, what else would they make aside from some wearable that just runs an LLM with heavy emphasis on the audio/speech modality? I have the feeling whatever it is will be uninspired and a giant let down.
> “I have a growing sense that everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment,” Ive said in a joint interview with OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman
Ah. What synergy, what serendipity. Right there.
Nice photo by the way — https://d7bnjsbkcwmq2m.archive.is/HgpSJ/945183ffb15e984274fa...
That photo is hella creepy. Hopefully it was AI generated
Today I read a couple of book reviews in the Economist with Sam Altman as the subject. The books are :
The Optimist. By Keach Hagey Empire of AI. By Karen Hao
The reviews are positive for both books. The column itself is titled "Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem" and shows a few reasons people have had some problems with his behaviour. One quote from the article is :
"Ms Livingston fired him, but as Ms Hagey recounts, he left chaos in his wake. Not only was he overseen by a non-functioning board, he had also used YC equity to help lure people to OpenAI. She says some YC partners saw a potential conflict of interest, “or at least an unseemly leveraging of the YC brand for Altman’s personal projects”."
Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem https://archive.is/oANfs
"Two books tell a similar tale about OpenAI. It is worrying"
Sounds a little like Holmes.
Holmes never showed anything.
$6.5 billion? Not bad for a company that doesn't even have a website.
Or, near as I can tell, any customers or any revenue. And apparently 55 employees.
tbh has jony ive produced any remarkable hardware piece since he left apple?
Can't think of any maybe im wrong
he must be buying the name or something or just the brains idk
Not sure if it counts for what you meant by hardware, since it's more art piece than a practical thing given the $60k price, but he created a record player:
He macbooked an existin piece of design excellence. I get that that was the brief, but ooosshhh.
As a CMO once said to me: you don't want to hire me, you want me 5 years ago, so hire X
$60k for a record player that looks like a record player.
idk, I expected a bit more risk-taking and creativity given the price and exclusivity.
Lol at the loving description of the manufacturing process for plywood (I think technically pressure-treated oriented strand board, but, you know, plywood)
Jobs directing, filtering, complementing Ive was clearly the winning combination.
Also remember Ive didn’t even plan for the watch to be fitness he wanted high end fashion. He’s not always the best. Lighting struck once and he says aluminum in a smart sounding way, give him a billion
To be fair, those aluminum chassis ended up involving spin welding to make them stiff enough at those dimensions, which I believe had mostly been used in aerospace up until that point.
alumininium
Ive just designed not practical thin furniture, like the bending iPhones and the ultra thin MacBooks with no way to release heat and the keyboard that was getting broken after pressing a bit too hard
Honestly once Jobs died most of what Ive did was ruin existing products, such as the butterfly keyboard and the removal of all of the useful ports from their laptops.
He also ruined the Vision Pro on his way out. Engineers wanted to do wireless to a Mac mini-like hub (not standalone) so the hub could have more computing power. It’s a dev device that was supposed to be the very best experience for developing the future standalone AR/VR device. But Ives forced them to do full standalone. Increasing weight, decreasing power, wasting time re-engineering the device.
I am baffled by the photo. I would have sworn it’s AI, instead apparently it’s a real photo? As someone who deals with pictures professionally and has experience with editorial photo editing, I am seriously disturbed but this.
OpenAI spinning into consumer hardware is a significant loss of focus for the company.
I can only explain it with them recognizing that their strongest asset is brand mindshare. This is actually really bad for their outlook as AI model pioneers.
Eventually it was going to be the case that AI will spread around. It can't be contained, it's too easy to distill and hence copy from output.
But I admit I didn't expect it to happen that soon. Also I respect Jony Ive, but expect his "AI devices" to all fail in the market. He's an idealist. He needs counterbalance that he currently lacks.
The video Altman posted on Twitter is so cringe I wouldn’t be surprised if it was directed by Mike Judge
I couldn't even watch the whole thing, such a fake glaze fest
Look at all of these big names that OpenAI is attaching itself to.
Buy "nobody company" from Jony Ive (using stock)
This incessant need to associate themselves with highly known individuals and over the top announcements reminds me of "Theranos" and infamous con artist, Elizabeth Holmes.
Sam Altman sure knows how to sell.
I wonder how much longer he can keep the con going, even though many of the original founders have left. Maybe 2-3 more years of this dog and pony show before it all comes crashing down in the most spectacular way.
After thinking for sometime it seems like even though Sam doesn't have any stake in io, he might have a stake in the Thrive fund that invested in io. Put $50M in a Thrive fund, which is used to invest in io that ultimately gets acquired by OpenAI at a really high valuation. Joshua from Thrive anyways wanted Sam to have some stake and the numbers being floated around was of the order of $7B. The whole thing seems absurd and makes me trust OpenAI even less.
And seems like it is actually trying to give a bonus to Sam or give money back to Thrive otherwise it would make no sense to acquire io with $1.5B cash in addition to the stock. I am surprised that the board approved this?
Given it’s a stock deal the question simply put is does bringing the highest profile technology designer in the world along with his team into OpenAI increase its terminal value by more than ~2%? If so, the acquisition is a success. Discussions of revenues and valuations and egos have little bearing on this question. To me it seems like an easy win on talent alone, let alone optics, network, and impact on future talent and capital conglomeration.
The video was filmed at Francis Ford Coppola's cafe. Worth a visit, the last time I was there they had a machine that printed out stories for you to take home.
OpenAI announcement: https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
The whole thing is almost indistinguishable from satire, without the domain name I'd have thought I'd been had.
The photo, the text, the video where Sam nearly looks like CGI, and then the quotes at the bottom really make for a full package of cringe.
I wasn't gonna check the link at first but you've convinced me, and holy shit that image of the two of them that greets you first thing is beyond hilarious.
You truly couldn't make this up, it's so beyond parody that I don't even know what to say. It's so palpably psychotic.
Reads and looks like an obituary, lol
The quotes at the bottom are funny because they have a share link which implies that Sam and Jony thought they were insightful enough that people would want to actively share them. Even in the extreme tech crowd, who would share those?
My reaction was just the same, but look at gruber:
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/21/sam-and-jony-io
and gruber is stirring up drama about why his links don't do well on hn.
You clearly haven’t been on my side of LinkedIn / Twitter.
Is this an m&a press release or an engagement announcement
The hyperminimal white-text-on-black-background is more of an Apple-ism from their corporate announcements back during the Jobs/Ive days.
The center-justified serif text is new, though.
When is their big day? Do they have a registry to send gifts? Anyways, congrats, looks like a happy couple.
"Sam and Jony"??!? Sam and Jony sounds like John and Yoko. Nothing good ever came out of that pair.
Altman: "Jony was running a design firm called LoveFrom that had established itself as really the densest collection of talent that I've ever heard of in one place AND HAS PROBABLY EVER EXISTED IN THE WORLD."
I felt physically sick from second-hand embarrassment watching this.
German has a word for second hand embarrassment. Fremdschämen. Comes in very handy here. If Sam continues like this it won’t be long until it becomes part of the regular English language like other German words such as Kindergarten.
And I’ll be happy that I don’t have to explain Fremdschämen anymore. Everything has its upsides.
Somehow when the buzz-word machine found talent density, half the passengers forgot that density has a denominator. I see this goof a lot. If you accept the premise that Jony is literally the most talented human in the entire history of the world (I know I know), then obviously he was more dense sitting in a room alone, than after being diluted by hiring 50 other people.
Seems like a weird move to say:
* Jony Ive has built a company with the densest collection of talent in the world
* OpenAI is spending 10 figures to buy a company from Ive
* It is not the aforementioned company with the dense collection of talent; it's instead a company that no one has heard of
I almost had to tap out after the number Ive did on Altman in the early monolouge. Feels like some kind of office satire written by Mike Judge
Very trumpian language.
Does he have anyone close to him to tell him that no amount of money can be used to turn oneself into Steve Jobs?
Jony would know about that as much as anyone.
First of all, the video is 9 minutes.
Secondly, is it a weird Sora-stitchedc video? It feels like they just filmed their parts separately like they're not even talking to each other/interacting with each other. Very peculiar.
The picture alone is enough to make you vomit
Deffinately a contender for one of the creepiest photos in the industry. Not something that inspires confidence in the "Design Prowess" of the acquisition if this is what they felt best represented them.
That and that every paragraph of text on the page is centre-aligned. What is this, Geocities?
Yeah, that is a really weird photo. Trying hard to replicate the iconic Steve Jobs photo I guess.
There's a video at the bottom "two friends"
There's infinite money out there for AI. They're doing the rational thing and buying up everything to lock others out.
If you're going to make any sort of hardware you definitely want to tout that it was designed "with love" by "the iPod guy."
The video is horrible.
It uses the same overhype playbook from the Segway launch: "Oh, I used the [unnamed, unexplained] device and it was the most amazing thing in the whole of human history!" "This object will cause the entire planet to be redesigned around it!"
I had to double check the domain, I thought it was a fake image gen. So weird.
Unclear if that announcing a tech acquisition or a new SF dating show.
The most expensive aquihire in history
This is what happens when you let a VC pretend to be a visionary
Whatever it is, if it’s AR, they won’t have the resources to do it. If they go Humaine’s clip voice assistant/projection, it’s dead on arrival. If they can do AR, it will be at meta Rayban level. What I’m saying is there is a real physical tech constraint where I’ve noticed the top hardware makers are hitting.
There really isn’t too many ways to interface with AI
I hope Windsurf and Jony got some real money along with their OpenAI stock.
I thought all acquisitions were done on leverage these days, is stock actually switching hands and not just magic money?
How would high net worth people like Jony Ive pay tax on this sort of big windfalls? Especially if it's all stock.
I remember seeing a device in tech news which was like a Mutalk [0] but without the mouth-piece. I cannot find the device (side: in fact, even to find Mutalk took ChatGPT's help as search-results were all about general noise-cancelling headphones), but if something like that is possible and what Jony Ive's stealth startup is working on, then this acquisition makes sense. Otherwise, if this AI consumer personal device is to be a thing, then I do not expect speaking aloud into a pin is ever going to become a reality (similar to how Google Glasses failed and that consumer AR devices will fail for generations to come).
This is such an obvious jump the shark moment for openAI.
These types of puffery acquisitions, with a former “legend”, announced with such gusto, have never materialized into anything.
You’re not gonna get breakthrough products like this. Breakthrough products just appear unexpectedly, they’re not announced a year or two ahead of time.
You know you are in front of the impending explosion of a bubble when discussions shift from products themselves and towards who will be working with whom.
I don’t think AI is a bubble at all, but openAI is.
OpenAI will pay most of the deal with an inflated evaluation. It could be that Jony wakes up one morning and finds OpenAI back at the ground. Sam is a master hype and inflation. He has cracked the code to generate free money and pays the companies with OpenAI equity.
Sam Altman already has a hardware company "World" - https://world.org/cofounder-letter which works on Orb (a hardware). Not sure if there is any connection between these.
> Introducing Worldcoin
> After visiting an Orb, a biometric verification device, you will receive a World ID.
> For each unique human who verifies their World ID with your Orb, you will earn WLD tokens.
> World Operators are independent local business owners or entrepreneurs who help make World available in their local communities.
> Make a USD $100 deposit to secure your priority for an Orb.
Really going for a full score on the scam checklist.
Ive is waaaay overrated. At least he brought a lot of fresh blood into the company. And Microsoft is just terrible with anything design related, so this might be a cool move, but MS is also terrible in acquiring companies and then letting them work.
It's interesting reading through the comments here. Lots of people slating Jony Ive. Is it a newer generation that doesn't know his work or an older generation that's forgotten?
The man has produced some of the greatest design work in the last few decades. Sure there were missteps (particularly in the quest for thinness in the laptop products) but he led design on some of the most iconic products and some of the most widely used products of all time.
iMac G3/4/5. iBook. iPod/Mini/Nano/Shuffle. iPhone. MacBook Air. iPad. Apple Watch. Not one person or company even comes close to having that kind of influence globally.
I had been considering doing a startup in this space, I thought Humane and rabbit are directionally correct. This kinda makes me want to do it even more, that would be a fun team to compete against.
The manor criticism of them is that they are just phone apps pointlessly shoved into an extra piece of hardware. What about them do you think was directionally correct? I.e. why not just use your phone?
"phone" is over - I would just make better devices, there would be a communications device, you could call it a phone or whatever. (Frankly: I just genuinely believe I could do a really good job here is all, I have no real reason to believe that except pure ego, I'm fine admitting that)
You’d win
That was both a very very kind and very very mean thing to say. :)
Is there actually a thing or product here they're talking about / they made / making?
Yes, in the video on OpenAI's website, they reference a product that Altman is testing at home created by Ive.
No, we can't see it yet. And there's not much description, either. Just that it's the "coolest technology that the world will have ever seen."
Altman: "We have like magic intelligence in the cloud. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT something right now, about something we had talked about earlier, think about what would happen. I would like reach down, I would get on my laptop, I'd open it up, I'd launch a web browser, I'd start typing, and I'd have to like explain that thing, and I would hit enter, and I would wait and I would get a response. And that it as the current limit of what a current laptop can do."
The above is very r/wheredidthesoda go but it hints at the product being ambient computing related.
Ambient computing backed by a cloud.
Hard pass.
It would have to be true AGI before I’d even consider that and that’s consider.
Why do we seem determined to will the Corporate Rim into existence from the Murderbot diaries.
Ambient computing is a fun way to say constant surveillance and extraction of highly intimate data.
Huh. I would pull out my phone, hold down the power button, and talk to Gemini Live. That's shipping today.
Altman apparently doesn't know what he's competing against. Not a good sign.
So, Alexa?
I'm also struggling to find the website for Ive's company that is being acquired for $6.5 billion. Maybe I'm just slow today, but does the company being acquired have a website?
They only have a landing page: https://www.lovefrom.com/
Nope. It's stealth-mode.
So one must infer based upon employees, monies, and other non-marketing intel.
It's a screenless & buttonless phone. Slightly smaller form factor than regular iphone, with comparatively bigger battery and powerful processing for on-device models.
Imagine listening to all the comments you just read.
Or reading them in the UI with only one word at a time on screen.
That’s why 80% or what have you of information is percieved via eyes.
Below is wild speculation:
> Five years to the week after he walked away from the top job designing the iPhone [1]
Sounds to me like OpenAI is going to make it's own consumer device. Maybe designed by the AI itself. The AI Is choosing it's own body?
[1]: https://archive.is/yixNr#selection-615.0-615.81 "After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own" - NYT
If you think current "AI" can design and build a consumer device, I have a lot of bridges that I'd like to sell you.
Future AI will deserve a say in the design of its own body, right? Maybe it's not smart enough now, but as it dawns into personhood it'll likely gain some legal rights, including perhaps over its own body. Anyhow, as the AI's gain personhood there will likely be human-led movements to give them more rights. It'll be seen as gauche or gross to do things to AI without consulting it.
I saw a quote today that's been living rent-free in my head ever since:
"AI utilitarians are in a suicide pact with the U.S. economy"
(attribution: @bencollins.bsky.social)
Success begets success indeed. What did Ive's startup ship in its 6 years that's worth 6 billion dollars, other than it belonging to Ive?
There were a lot of stuff: leica, moncler jacket, turntable, some prints and typography, a lot of stuff for airbnb, you name it
I find it amusing that IO a company with no product and no history is valued and bought at $6.5B.
The dotcom bubble gave insane valuations to "companies" that literally had a static html page and no product or service.
That is WILD to think about because I regularly create one-pager websites for my own projects...kinda bewildering to comprehend valuations for something so basic.
Those insane valuations were not 1% of this.
Maybe that's a reason to stop doing it.
What do you mean? The idea is obvious, it's an Apple Homepod sized orb-screen, like a mini Vegas projector, running OpenAI's realtime API.
So, basically a Palantir?
Sounds to me like money is being distributed to that startup‘s investors?
Supra-aural headphones with a spherical camera rig would be really powerful ambient for first big AI-first product.
The perfect setup for blind people.
I have a blind friend that's been getting value from the Meta Ray-Ban spectacles. He used to have spectacles that let a human see where he was going and offer suggestions/directions/descriptions/etc. but replaced those with this somewhat more private solution and found various compelling (in his descriptions to me) use cases. I personally think AI is going to land on "coding" and "accessibility" successfully and fail in most other domains.
> The purchase — the largest in OpenAI’s history
Am I missing something here! Apart from Windsurf, what else did they acquire?
They also where seed investors on Cursor
actually sama was kicked out as CEO of YC because he was meddling too much openai-sub companies to prop them up and get a big chunk or smt.
he also stole reddit lol, sorry i mean -acquired- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41657001
What people don't seem to notice: Jony is wearing the glasses and appears to be reading from them.
Or he is just looking at the camera? An odd photo in any case.
Was just saying that glasses are most likely the product they're talking about.
At least folks who are too young to have experienced sock puppets et al get to see what it was like.
Interview: Jony Ive on what he’s cooking up in San Francisco
https://monocle.com/business/can-jony-ive-save-san-francisco...
People seem to be overlooking this: “ Altman doesn’t have equity in io, OpenAI said. “
What about equity-like-instruments-that-don’t-have-the-word-equity-in-the-name?
Or stakes in other companies that company then buys
The other archive link seems to be timing out for me, here's another one if you need it: https://archive.ph/AiEC0
Does Ive's "AI" have an unhealthy thinness fetish?
It is fascinating how design has become the new gold standard in the AI era. It really looks the strongest signals come from taste and design quality and AI is killing other signals.
What design are we talking about? An interface with a text input box at the bottom, chat view on top and a list of previous conversations on the left? Takes an entry level engineer a few hours to come up with that, not a $6.5B design firm and Jony Ive.
Funny how the reality is exactly the opposite of what you're saying. Design was already on life support and AI was the final plug pull.
For some designs, sure — AI will likely generate most of the UX for, say, SaaS products. But when it comes to high-quality, innovative designs, humans will lead.
People were obsessed with design before the “AI era” too.
Seems that OpenAI is acquiring Io for $6.4B in an all-equity deal.
That is an insane amount to hire Johnny Ive. Just to signal to the market that OpenAI is getting into hardware, what on earth could they be building towards. They’ve been writing some big checks off late, these costs will have to be justified soon enough.
Or he thinks OpenAI is really only worth something in the $30B range and he is getting a steal while his currency is hot.
considering that the deal is "an all-stock" one, that would not be a great bet.
The obvious answer would be some sort of consumer AI assistant, like Siri but better.
This is a bet that's as insane as the Apple car. They're going to try to get people to buy a specialized device from a company that isn't just a software company but really a B2B API company—the only successful consumer-facing product they have ever released was an accident, a tech demo that went viral.
And what exactly is that device going to do that the iPhone (and smartphones in general) can't already do with at a minimum a few small tweaks to the existing flagships?
In the right context vertical integration can make sense, but hardware is a big stretch for OpenAI right now. They haven't even really pinned down the consumer software angle yet.
I mean for this kind of money and pedigree the obvious answer to me is kill the smartphone level tech.
10 mins I spent watching that weird video in third person dialogue no less, they better deliver something great.
Totally insane, $6.5B acquihire. But also, all stock deal and OpenAI appears to have an unlimited number of investors waiting to give them money if/when needed.
Acqui-hire startup -> Jony onboard -> new device with OpenAI exclusive features -> Windows Phone is back. /s (kinda)
They're not hiring Jonny. He's going to take over design, but basically as an independent contractor with LoveFrom.
I love how aggressive Sam is with this stuff. He’s very smart in this arena. I’m all about OpenAI creating new fun things
The first paragraph of the article mentions it's an all-stock deal. No checks where written for this.
VCs have too much capital at hand and don't know how to deploy it all.
This is on the back of epic wealth inequality.
I don't know why Jony Ive is seen to be worth billions, but he's obviously not, he's just another shill in the ivory tower.
> I don't know why Jony Ive is seen to be worth billions, but he's obviously not.
Agreed. If it was the only option it would have been worth it to Apple to pay him billions to _leave_. His last 5-10 years at Apple were marked by him ruining a number of products.
VCs don’t have a ton of capital on hand right now, interest rates are high, investments are way down
> $6.5 billion all-stock deal
It's 6.5 billion in monopoly money. OpenAI has an insane valuation right now, and they're using it to buy stuff with it, as they should.
That's 1% of OpenAI allegedly value
[dead]
A solution looking for a problem. We already have devices which can access AI with ease. I don't need your proprietary data farming apis in the OS level...
Ive has made hits in the past.
In hindsight, it might be a cheap acquihire.
They could've just ChatGPT'd the design
Just for a moment i imagined a world in which Jony Ive befriended the Internet Archive and they joined to start a new company called io.
Was "io" a company before this? Only Jony Ive thing I remember from the last number of years was LoveFrom creative studio...
Doesnt Altman own 20% of Ive's "startup"?
I don't know... looks like pure marketing
the timing feels a bit off. is the hardware / form really the limiting factor to AI adoption at this moment in time?
the video on the homepage certainly is ai generated, no? all of the scenes in the cafe are definitely tripping my ai radar
It's a real restaurant.
doesnt mean the video isnt ai generated
Does io even have a company website? I cannot find anything about it on Google except for the acquisition news..
So Sam has found a way to pay himself.
Wonder if both companies have a common investor who wanted to cash out and save at least part of the bag.
Hiring a prolific designer, won't buy you the next iPhone. In fact, $6b would have been better spent on the supply chain, the manufacturing intelligence in Asia, and the dirty and difficult work of producing hardware. People forget, how much work is actually needed to produce some innovation like this at scale.
OpenAI's business model seems to be "technological singularity or bust".
Must be one hell of a prototype.
Made out of exquisite aluminium I’m sure.
Use a white background, throw in as many verbs as you can and duck all the money thrown at you I guess.
don't forget the clickwheel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
I feel like they are trying let public invent the product they will work on..
How much value was created using products created by Jony Ive and his team?
It feels like the AI world is hitting a kind of hardware inflection point
This is the worst price to value ratio for an acquihire ever.
The feature image for that article is a but too suggestive.
What are the chances of seeing an "OpenAI Phone"?
zero
Would be quite funny if Apple now acquires OpenAI.
We love throwing cash at Jony Ive!
Reminds me of Yahoo buying Broadcast.com for $6billion in 1999. They did it to pump up their stock price, pretend they had a strategy.
Made Mark Cuban a billionaire.
Probably there is a big grey market in OpenAI shares, and this is a similar strategy.
I hope it's not just another orb that talks to you. Maybe they're making humanoids, that's all the rage now... I do wonder what they have built! Surely something right?
The video they posted looks like its made with AI. Their movements and facial expressions are too uncanny
i thought so too. way too weird looking. there's a reason they zoomed on their faces whenever they were talking - to hide the unnatural hand movement
I don't doubt that Ive can make a product team that will deliver something, but how does something so clearly aware it was going to evoke feelings of Jobs' Apple, end up so cluelessly narcissistic in delivery in such a non Jobs way. Are they infatuated about the product and the experience or what partnering up means to these two men's self-image?
They say they'll design a "fully novel" type of product - what does that mean? If we take them at their word then it rules out glasses, watches, phones, laptops, and headphones. What does that leave? What seems most in line with Johnny Ive's minimalism is necklaces, rings, or pendants. Could we see some kind of AI brooch in 2026?
Classic hacker news Gnosticism making fun of a designer. The idea the iphone software ecosystem had anything to do with its success is humorous. Remember it didn't even have an app store or anyway to run local yet it was a best seller. Keep worshiping code like it doesn't run on hardware, ha.
This is a sign of OpenAI's weakness.
Altman is desperately trying to use OpenAI's inflated valuation to buy some kind of advantage. Which is why he's buying ads, paying $6.5 billion in stock to Jony Ive, and $3 billion for a VSCode fork created in a few months.
Almost anything makes sense when you see your valuation going to zero unless you can figure something out.
Facebook is a great example of doing this and it succeeding very well. Zuck recognized that Facebook was going to zero and bought WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus. My guess is that sama sees the writing on the wall and knows that he must expand OpenAI in a similar way.
What happens to OpenAI competitors that can't make similar moves is another question.
Let's ignore the 46 billion dollars wasted on the metaverse: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/meta-platforms-has-spent-$46...
Windsurf is not Instagram. Jony Ive's company is not WhatsApp. There are no meaningful network effects or lock in with these AI products.
Ive's company is going to make some forgettable, overpriced, and easily cloned wearable pendant or something equally irrelevant. Windsurf (and Cursor) will quickly fade into irrelevance as IDEs are once again commoditized by open source.
Agreed. This doesn't look like 4D chess, this stinks of desperation.
I completely disagree. This is really just more of the great execution that I've come to expect from Sam Altman.
Core to OpenAI's strategy is that they control not just the models, but also the entrypoints to how these models are used. Don't take it from me, this is explicitly their strategy according to internal documents (https://x.com/TechEmails/status/1923799934492606921).
Some important entrypoints are:
- Entrypoints for layman consumers: They already control this entrypoint due to ChatGPT, the app. They have a limited moat here because they are at the whims of the platform owners, primarily Apple and Google. This is why they are purchasing Ive's startup.
- Entrypoints for developers: They acquired Windsurf, and are actively working on cloud development interfaces such as the new codex product.
- Entrypoints for enterprise: They have the codex products as described above, but also Operator, and are actively working on more cloud based agents.
A rebuttal that I anticipate to the above goes something along the lines of this: "If they have so much capital and dev experience, why are they acquiring these businesses instead of building internal competitors? This is a demonstration of their failure to execute"
The current AI boom is one of the most competitive tech races that has ever occurred. It is because of this, and particularly because they are so well capitalised that it makes sense to acquire instead of build. They simply cannot afford to waste time building these products internally if they can purchase products much further along in their development, and then attach them to their capital and R&D engine
Of note, and to support your argument, all of these deals are stock only.
Weakness that is rooted in blind ambition that is not backed up by any kind of vision.
Which, when you think about it, is really kind of sad. They would have been so much better off as a non-profit.
Windsurf and Cursor are money factories, that’s not a dumb play, their base will only grow significantly. OpenAI doesn’t have many money factories like google yet.
Paying for Jony doesn’t seem like desperation. Jony has no product that makes money, this is a long term aggressive hardware play. Seemingly to face off with apple.
It feels more like people just want to craft a negative narrative about OpenAI and use the data to fit that
OpenAI does literally anything
“This is a sign of OpenAI’s weakness”
I think this is the third time I’ve seen this exact comment at the top of a HN post about an OpenAI announcement.There is a weird amount of emotional investment in not wanting OpenAI to win.
Personally, I am just excited to see what the device looks like. The prototype must be good to justify this valuation.
I think a lot of people on here have heard enough stories about how Sam Altman behaves when the cameras aren't looking and dislike him and thus his company.
Also its normal backlash - when something gets so popular so fast, you are going to naturally have some haters.
Lastly actions speak louder than words. OpenAI used to talk about AGI and Super AI and nuclear launch codes and national security. Now they are buying VS Code forks and ad companies.
The AI race is more than heating up and Sama knows it and he's throwing some hail mary's in hopes to keep OpenAI near or at the top.
While I agree the AGI thing is mostly bullshit the whole market is aware that models aren't the end-all-be-all and people will not be making huge profits out of them, all the other big players have other side businesses they can use to upsell the models, OpenAI doesn't and they need to figure something out.
Reddit ads too, you know it must be really bad.
AGI any day now, though! Any day now.
I can’t wait to see what machined aluminum experience they come up with together.
oh my.
I actually thought the video they posted[1] would have information, but that was just 9 minutes of two guys congratulating each other.
Sounds like the same level of substance IO had before it was purchased.
Aside from the news is there anything more to this acquisition than two people effectivly repeating "look at us" on loop?
This right here. How is this being treated as news, not back slapping?
The ability for a CEO to be a founder of another company and then buy that company with the company he is a CEO of seems incredibly sketchy. See also: bullshit idea that someone can actually run multiple companies, it’s ceo welfare and vanity titles.
No one is forcing you to invest in said companies. As an investor it's up to you to do due diligence on the board, conflict of interest disclosures, whether sizeable acquisitions require shareholder approval, etc.
This is on top of blanket legal protections that already exist in case you didn't want to do your own DD, like duty of loyalty, care and fiduciary; SEC disclosures, AD @ the DoJ, FTC, etc.
Not sure what you are replying to. I'm not investing in OpenAI nor do I want to. I can call out BS behavior without being an investor.
Or being CEO of a company and then using as vendors for your employee benefits companies that you've invested in. Blatant unethical self-dealing.
Sometimes two collaborators make each other better than either are alone. I get the sense that's how Steve Jobs and Jony Ive were. I've not seen anything Ive has done since be as good as what he did before. Someone has to hold the spike so the other one can swing the hammer. My guess is that's not how this relationship with Altman will work. And that picture is terrifying, please take it down and destroy the camera that took it.
Everything about this announcement screams “we’re completely out of touch”
I am terrified of this company making any products
Let 'em make overpriced tchotchkes with private capital all they want. I'm more worried about them winning inflated government contracts and tax credits paid for with public dollars.
The headline then is "Sam Altman pays Johnny Ive $6.6Bn to become his Collaborator". Not a bad idea really IMHO.
He most definitely did not pay $6.6B. The beauty of these OpenAI acquisitions is that they are all-stock transactions so only worth the face value in the make-believe world OpenAI investors seem to live in.
What is it about that picture that's so icky? I had the exact same reaction.
It's a weirdly intimate pose, and it looks like it was taken from way too close— almost at arms-length, like a selfie, rather than from 8-10 feet back with a normal 80mm portrait lens. Altman especially looks kind of fish-bowled, being the one in front.
It's a Hall and Oates album cover featuring two idea guys hellbent on putting artists out of work.
Russians have the famous meme for that [1] (just see the photo)
Literal translation is “my snot-nosed kid / my little shit”
https://neolurk.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%...
Jobs, for all his enormous character flaws, was a humanist - he believed in people and he wanted to make beautiful objects that would enhance people's lives. He was also an enormous asshole and constitutionally incapable of masking his disdain for solutions he didn't feel measured up. Ive can make a visually beautiful object, but he's shown he doesn't have the feel for the actual user, and Jobs' humanism is the half of that partnership that made it work.
Altman's got none of that (well, except the asshole part) - no vision, no taste, no concept of what a user would want, no real belief in humanity or desire to make things for humans. Ive and Altman together is going to be a disaster.
This is a fantastic comment and I couldn’t agree more. I don’t what they’re going to come up with as a result of this partnership but I expect that it will be utterly lacking in the qualities you describe. You really put your finger on it.
> Sometimes two collaborators make each other better than either are alone.
I don't disagree. Lennon + McCartney were able to fill in bridges, suggest lyrics, etc.
I've always been bothered by Ive's form-over-function though. Or perhaps it is too easy to call out a designer's very public mistakes when on the whole he has done well. For all I know it was Jobs that pushed the design choices that I dislike.
But just to iterate a couple things I dislike: the round mouse on the iMac (obv.), connectors on the back of the modern iMacs (that uncomfortable scratching sound when you're trying to find the USB slot and grate against anodized aluminum)....
You wonder, did he actually use the thing or just admire looking at it?
> Someone has to hold the spike so the other one can swing the hammer.
Interesting choice of metaphor.
It looks like a much different type of collaboration is going on.. (someone had to say it x)
the photo is a play on a historical image https://imgur.com/a/VnTMINR
Is that really supposed to be Zuck with an older version of himself??
This announcement is inexplicably amusing. It's like the announcement of the iPhone without the iPhone.
They've distilled the purest essence of Jony Ive.
Ive has finally made something so thin - you can't even see it!
let me know when you're doing a standup set and I'll be there.
These product-focused moves feel like a tacit admission that AGI is further away than they’ve been preaching.
If it was close at hand, spending precious resources on anything other than pursuing AGI wouldn’t make sense.
Does anyone seriously think we're anywhere close to AGI with LLMs? I know CEOs like to say things to blow smoke up investors asses, but does anyone with actual credibility think that?
Anecdata but I talk to lots and lots of AI/ML/DS engineers. Everyone knows the current LLM architecture won't work for AGI. All the "reasoning" models are just pseudoreasoning and there is severe data leakage and benchmaxxing when the companies tout the capabilities.
People really avoid considering what the word "general" implies. Yesterday I tried sending o3 a screenshot of some sheet music, asking for a midi file of how it sounds. Complete failure x3. Could not even get the value of the first note right. This is not "general" intelligence.
I believe Yann LeCun more than I do any CEO. And he has been pretty clear you’re not going to get AGI any time soon.
Previously discussed on HN:
Fifteen years ago I worked with a guy who, in retrospect, was very similar to an LLM. He was extremely verbally gifted and a vacuum cleaner for information. He could speak brilliantly about any topic he had been exposed to. He was a great person to send to a meeting, because he was great at answering questions coherently with the information he had on hand, and he always managed to make your ideas sound smarter than you could yourself. Based on that, you might think he sounds like a gifted human, until I tell you about his major weakness: if you asked him about something he didn't know about, he would often speak just as surely, fluently, and compellingly about it. He hallucinated just like an LLM, and that's why he was stuck in roles without a high level of responsibility despite his verbal gifts.
He was neither arrogant nor self-conscious. He treated his hallucinations as if they were the kinds of simple mistakes other people made, like, oops, I thought I understood this but I don't, no different from oops, I forgot my umbrella.
I sometimes wondered if he had a specific condition that made him the way he was, but I never doubted that he was human, with "general intelligence."
I see a lot of replies suggesting agreement: LLMs are nowhere close to AGI.
I agree — it may well be a completely different path we need to go down to get to AGI ... not just throwing more resources at the path we've pioneered. As though a moon landing were going to follow Montgolfier's early balloon flights in "about five years".
At the same time, there is suddenly so much attention + money on AI that maybe someone will forge that new path?
"Money is All You Need".
No. People hype it but it's obvious we're hitting a wall with LLMs.
That being said, the "apps" that use LLMs coming out now are good. Not AGI good, but they do things, will be disruptive and have value.
And the money coming it could lead to new techniques and eventual AI. For now though, it looks like AI is transitioning into products and figuring out how to lower inference costs.
I do think LLMs will make incredible progress and we'll see lots of breakthroughs from it, but I agree it's nowhere close to AGI.
I'm not sure that matters though—if a technology can give humans what they want exactly when they want it, it doesn't matter if AGI, LLMs, humans, or some other technology is behind that.
Tyler Cowen claims it's already here. I don't agree with him but he has credibility with a lot of people.
depends on what we mean when define AGI
i think there's ample evidence to suggest that we're growing closer (3-5 year timeline?) to replacement-level knowledge workers in targeted fields with limited scope. i don't know that i would call that AGI? but i think it's fair to call it close.
thing is that has value, but compute ain't cheap and the value prop there is more of reducing payroll rather than necessarily scaling business ops. this move to me looks like a recognition that generalized AI on it's own isn't a force multiplier as long as you have bottlenecks that make it too pricey to scale activity by an order of magnitude or more.
I expect a fair number of non-technical LLM proponents, and probably some engineers as well, have likely built machines quite capable of helping them fool themselves that it is.
Nobody fully understands how human intelligence works. It's implausible we'll be able to replicate it or even come up with something better in the short term.
to answer that you have to define AGI first
I remain unconvinced they're (the whole LLM/"Attention Is All You Need" industry) even barking up the right tree to build anything usefully-close to "AGI".
The idea that any situation or sensory input can be broken down into a sequence of tokens, and that action choice can be characterized by predicting a subsequent sequence of tokens in the same space, may well bear fruit.
But I think that a lot of people also buy into the idea that "text and image data from the web, and from historical chats, is the right/only way to generate the data set required," and it's a dangerous trap to fall into.
What do you think the correct, or at least a more likely tree is?
its certainly currently useful and also generally intelligent, right?
Or just a realization that they are mainly up against google with a massive money factory. They need their own money factories or they won’t survive long term
AGI is the ultimate money factory if they could deliver it on the timelines that they were projecting until recently.
I disagree for two reasons.
1) the two decisions do not seem related to each other. OpenAI has capital to spend and is seeking distribution methods to shore up continued access to future capital. That strategic decision seems totally unrelated to their estimated timelines for when AGI (whatever definition you are using) will show up. Especially because they are in a race against other players. It may be a soft signal that more capital is not going to speed up the AGI timeline right now, but even that is a soft signal.
2) I think we already have AGI for any reasonable definitions of the terms 'artificial' 'general' and 'intelligence'. To wit: I can ask Gemini 2.5 a question about basically anything, and it will respond more coherently and more accurately than the vast majority of the human population, about a vast array of subjects.
I do not understand what else AGI could mean.
(In case it matters, I am also an AI researcher, I know many AI researchers, and many-but-not-all agree with me)
I asked Gemini to read a clock for me with hands on 10 and 2 and it got the long hand and the short hand backwards, probably because of the massive trove of online documentation about the symmetry of 10 after 10 being aesthetically pleasing for PR materials and icons or some such nonsense unrelated to the question or the clock.
I don't know about you, but I learned how to read an analog clock in kindergarten and Gemini got it wrong.
There's no post-LLM story. This consolidation is both building product and user-capture before that becomes wildly admitted.
I think LLMs will become more useful and more efficient over time as models refine but these aren't the (AI) droids you're looking for.
what does LLVM mean here?
If we’re talking about the singularity robot takeover fast takeoff, maybe that’s true.
But Sam and others have said they see AGI is an uneven process that may not have a clear finish line. The intelligence is spiky and some parts will be superhuman while other parts lag.
Note that they started saying that recently after their earlier projections didn't pan out. The "uneven process without a clear finish line" angle was Altman recently trying to reset expectations, which means it doesn't contradict OP's thesis that this move towards product is further admission that AGI is going to be much messier than they initially predicted.
That sounds exactly what you would say if you had staked hundreds of millions of dollars and your personal reputation on something you increasingly know isn't possible.
Sounds like excuses
Can't do a singularity robot takeover without robots and you may as well use designer ones.
Dude just says whatever he thinks will make Line Go Up on his accounts. It's basically the only thing he does.
Doesn't this contradict the whole idea of AGI? How is it still "general" if it is "spiky" with numerous gaps in its "intelligence"?
It sounds like a CEO moving the goalposts when asked to accomplish something they don't think they can deliver.
Because LLM's as they exist right now are incredibly useful and you can make a lot of money from them? AGI isn't god. It might not even be especially useful.
Is there a profitable LLM out there right now that anyone can point to as an example?
it's funny I feel like top of the line LLMs are basically AGI already or very close, you can have reasonable discussions with them about any subject etc & that a lot of anti LLM talk is grasping at straws & goalpost moving
People's definitions of AGI vary a lot, although I agree LLMs are getting pretty good.
RE: product-focused moves
These are tentacles that AGI will need.
Yeah, AGI needs a VS Code fork.
What's with the black and white "couples" photo? Seems like they're on the verge of kissing or something for a romantic novel cover.
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The self dealing king Sam Altman strikes again
He is second only to Elon in this case (SolarCity, X/XAI).
That's why they so despise each-other; they're the same
Has nobody learned anything from the Humane saga? I don't get it - if you have something so revolutionary and so great, just release it and let it speak for itself!
This was exactly my thought. Image HumaneRabbit R1LLM. Developed with an unlimited budget. It will be a $3000 paperweight assembled from the finest raw materials available.
I dont get it, so there's no actual product?
Posturing and FOMO + shoveling money to friends
Tangent: Did Windsurf actually get acquired by OpenAI? I would have imagined some sort of announcement from OpenAI at the very least? Bloomberg was the one to break that news too, but haven't seen any follow up.
Acquire as many companies to quickly dilute the OpenAI non-profit ownership.
$6,500,000,000 dollars for ... what, exactly?
55 engineers and the opportunity to be associated with Apple products via Jony Ive.
Honestly with OpenAI buying Windsurf, and now this (whatever this is) I'd say that the company is in trouble and is now desperately attempting to buy it's way into relevancy. Either OpenAI wants to become a developer tools company (which can't be that profitable), or a consumer goods company. Trying to become the next Apple is really the only way to ever make the money they spend back.
OpenAI is a failing company. They made the first move, that will be their claim to fame. Sadly it turned out that what they are doing isn't that hard to replicate, just hard to profit from.
I honestly think that Google is going to be the long term winner. They were behind at first, but now their models are the state of the art, and cheaper, and crucially Google as a whole makes enough money to float the business.
The iPhone was once in a lifetime thing. Jony was just one of the pieces
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So they paid $5B to hire Jony Ive? Is there even a product or just all vibes?
Perhaps buying him so Apple doesn't?
(Just wild speculation — but one that would be on par for Corporate America over the past decade or two.)
I’ve heard stories of people paying $5B to get divorced, haven’t heard any paying $5B to their ex-husbands :)
They didn't even get to hire Jony Ive
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That is absolutely not their website
Thanks. Could you share the link?
I'm having trouble finding their website.
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This is the worst thread I have ever seen on Hacker News. Fatuous, self-important, superficial, judgmental. Do better people.
It’s looks like to me a bunch of people who don’t use ChatGPT daily for everything under the sun. As once you let your imagination run wild with it ..you can see why 500 million use GPT daily to do so many varied things that u can’t go a day without using it and your usage of google is on the decline! Why you want to pick up your phone and have GpT right on ur Lock Screen do to everything under the sun including having it interface with AI agents to book travel, book a local tow truck, reserve whatever, ask questions about friends & family via their own agents, etc
Finally a GPT phone or personal AI mobile device looks to be in the works!
I’m done with iPhone once GPT releases their personal mobile AI device!
*Hmmm being downvoted the 500 million who use GPT daily won’t be excited to ditch iPhone for GPT phone? Love to hear why others think this isn’t a good idea?
OpenAI board: "Should we dilute the company 2% to acquire Jony Ive for the next 10 years? Yes."
Hacker News: "Man these OpenAI folks are idiots."
OpenAI absolutely should be getting in the hardware game; Ive is a mix of status acquisition and unicorn, and is not the only person/team/company you'd need to make a quality hardware product. But on balance I'd pay 2% of every company I ever had any financial engagement with to get Mr. Ive doing its design. I mean srsly.
At the risk of being the idiot: Being very smart doesn't prevent you from saying and doing very stupid things.
My problem is that Altman is a very smart idiot. He already admitted that OpenAI have absolutely no idea how to make money. Apparently they've now given up on the idea of asking ChatGPT how to make money. Their "AI" not going to develop fast enough, if ever. So now they are just buying up stuff left and right? It might be part of some coherent plan, but if it is, no one else is seeing it.
Altman is smart enough to see that things are not working out and that he's going to run out of money and investor patience. He might also be smart enough to see that if OpenAI fails, so will 80 - 90% of his competitors, not sure if he care though. He needs OpenAI to survive, but he's not that kind of smart, and honestly I'm not sure anyone is.
I feel like we must live in very different worlds! The major AI companies have in excess of 100mm customers each. There’s so much demand for compute that wise investors are literally buying up nuclear plant building companies.
LLMs have blown through every major test people have put in front of them invariably beating estimates as to how long it would take them. Pull up Dwarkesh’s podcast about ARC wherein the creator of ARC proposes it could likely never be super-human with current architectures, about 3 months before o3 provably became superhuman on ARC, spurring the creation of a new “better” (and it is better!) test.
To my outside eyes the OpenAI plan is simple: get too big to fail and be ready to navigate changing investor appetite. Plus maintain technical leadership if possible. And build an enduring consumer brand. Simple but hard. You will note that (as far as I know) they have invested in zero direct physical infrastructure, preferring compute deals with companies like Microsoft and Coreweave.
To my eyes their risk point would be: massive loss in quality/cost to a competitor (Gemini 2.5 pro underscores that Google is a real contender here, and has like six generations of custom chips that make their economics different), or somehow investors remain bullish on AI but bearish on OpenAI to the extent they can finance a legitimate competitor.
If investors lose interest generally, we will enter a new era of higher-cost inference and comparatively less demand. This is the intent behind doing compute contracts rather than owning data centers — a contract likely shifts most of this risk right out onto data center providers; OpenAI can just pay for less compute time. I don’t think this is a ‘death’ scenario for them, because this will be a general loss of interest and therefore all AI companies will stop being able to give away free inference. OAI might contract (probably would) in this world. They might slow down on new model training. (Probably would). But, so would everyone else.
Another way to say it - they’re spending single digit billions of dollars on training and research right now. Think of that as creating a strategic asset, and ALSO customer acquisition cost (e.g. image creation this year — new, better models = more paying customers).
Against a 200mm customer base, would you spend $20-50 to acquire a customer that pays $20/month? Their CAC is low right now. Really low!
This is why I’d propose the major risk is that they get singled out of the herd as ‘non-investable’ vis-a-vis other AI companies. To my eyes they don’t look to be at risk of this right now; if they somehow got there, this would be a real problem - it would lead to the scenario I think you’re imagining — they’d have no money to give away inference / train models, but competitors would.
So, you have to ask, are they sufficiently large, popular, technology leaders, embedded as a strategic US asset in the military industrial complex to avoid that fate? My outside assessment is: definitely.
Ive left Apple 6 years ago. What exactly has his company done since?
And before that he was responsible for some of the worst hardware decisions in Apple history.
It doesn't even matter. The video on the site says it all when Sam says "This guy designed the iPhone, the Macbook Pro!" -- they're buying a brand, a legend. They can now say they have "the iPod guy" on their team. Nobody else has Jony and that's what matters.
I don't understand all the pessimism and incredulity about the valuation. This is an acquisition to take on and disrupt Apple.
Ives + Altman is perceived as a viable successor to the Ives + Jobs partnership that made Apple successful.
Apple is weak and doesn't seem capable of innovating anymore, nor do they seem to understand how to build AI into products.
There's an opportunity to build an Apple-sized hardware wearables company with AI at its core, just as Altman built ChatGPT and disrupted the Google-sized search.
"Apple-sized" more than justifies a 5B valuation.
How exactly does OpenAI go about disrupting Apple? Are they going to build an entire OS, line of hardware products, and create a massive developer ecosystem to for apps to be available?
I just don't exactly see how that is done by hiring a bunch of designers to a company whose current offering is a chatbot & API interface.
I don't think ChatGPT really disrupted Google search? It definitely forced Google to release Gemini + related products though. Google still has millions of users and they now have AI integrated with search. The latest Gemini models are also as capable if not more than some of OAI's models.
I don't see how Altman is going to disrupt Apple with just Ive and a company no one's heard of before.
Altman ain't no Jobs, though.
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How will this not provoke an investigation from the FBI?
Altman funds and cavorts with fascists. This project is soiled from day one.
Likely no coincidence that they announce their company, io, during Google I/O.
Search "io" on Google right now and see what comes up...
I'm pretty sure this was named years ago
I'm more referring to launch timing
> Search "io" on Google right now and see what comes up...
I don't know about you, but neither of them comes up. Google I/O has always been something you have to search for including the "Google" part and this news is all about Jony Ive, not the nondescript company name.
Went in an incognito window and searched "io" and this announcement was shown right above Google IO [1].
For all those (like me) who still believed in the spirit of Steve (via Jony Ive). We were wrong. He's about the money like the rest of em.
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This invited a flamewar. Please don't do this here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44055918 and marked it off topic.
I for example, got permabanned from one of the major politics subreddits.
Basically what happened was I wrote a post, and some guy responded to me with a firehose of personal insults. I called him a troll in reply, and within 30 seconds of posting said reply, I was permabanned as a first offense, without any possibility of appeal.
Mods be powertrippin over there.
Being banned from a subreddit is different from a permaban from reddit that "tracks you across google accounts"
Not the same person, but as an example, I got banned from r/europe for posting just "I'm proud to be a Romanian!". That was on a post about Romania overtaking Poland to become number one at some anti-woke metric western Europeans care a lot about.
I'll give my example, although it's a bit out of place on my part...
/r/news locked/suppressed [0] as 'Politics'.
I sent a Message to modmail:
Me: Calling this 'politics' makes me ask who's on the an alphabet payroll... Just saying.
Reply from modmail: This message makes us think you haven't bothered to read the rules... Just saying.
Then I was muted from /r/new modmail for 28 days, while also being perma-banned from /r/news.
Months layer, I had left a normal comment on a different thread with a 'mobile' secondary account on /r/news, and found both my desktop and mobile accounts locked for 7 days because the /r/news comment was considered 'ban evasion'. Despite having otherwise commented on /r/news from my mobile account in the meantime with no repercussions.
It was within the subreddit rules and reddit TOC to do all of this, I acknowledge, at the same time it's almost like Reddit is hitting that vibe of StackOverflow from a few years ago where mods can just power trip and make the place less useful for everyone...
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1es7sbp/us_considers_...
A post of mine in the bodybuilding subreddit was removed after 55 points and all 29 comments removed because the mods made up an entirely arbitrary new rule that there should be only one post about a recent bodybuilding show. The subreddit rules had no such thing. They just made it up. When I messaged the mods, they banned me from messaging them. Huh?
Another example:
Apple subreddit allows developers to self-promote their apps on Sundays. I posted an app of mine. Mods removed it and banned me for 100 days from the subreddit because I had 4 comments within the last month and not 5. This is despite me having lots more comments and posts (multiple posts/comments over 7000 points) over 7 years and in last 2 months instead of last 1 month.
Just adding to the noise, but the thing that finally got my 15+ year old account banned was reporting some blatantly racist comments. Apparently if a subreddit mod agrees with the reported comment, they can just report you for "abusing the report system". The original comment never got removed, of course.
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Depending on who you ask, Reddit either doesn't tolerate criticism of Palestine or it doesn't tolerate criticism of Israel.
It is almost like there are many opinions in that place.
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Smart move by OpenAI to try an cement their position as the "iPhone" of AI.
if you own the device, you control the flow of data and dollars
A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition. Tentative ideas and explorations evolved into tangible designs.
The ideas seemed important and useful. They were optimistic and hopeful. They were inspiring. They made everyone smile. They reminded us of a time when we celebrated human achievement, grateful for new tools that helped us learn, explore and create.
this doesn't sound like it was written by an actual human being. or even a cat
The name is "IO". A day after the Google I/O keynote. Another purposely planned derailment.
It's probably some form of glasses with ChatGPT on it but obvious glazing, pomp and ceremony of this announcement talking directly to Apple.
Apple has 1 year to respond.
Apple is failing horrible at “AI” currently but I don’t see what the big deal with Jony Ive is in 2025. He had a massive (if not single-handed) impact on some of the _worst_ hardware Apple has ever shipped, thinner, thinner, thinner to the product’s detriment and butterfly keyboards. I lay that all at Ive’s feet.
you must really have an axe to grind, you've commented three times on the same article with how much you hate ive. you're right his later work was a little frustrating, but he's also the same guy who brought you the ipod, the iphone, the ipad, the apple watch, and airpods. maybe he's not batting 1000 but the level of vitriol here is striking.
Google are the ones who named their conference after such a popular concept.
Apple should buy Anthropic I think. It’s the last available lab.
Mistral is good too.
Sam is playing 4D chess here. He needs top-tier talent and design to build the next generation of AI hardware, and this move pulls in both capital and talent. Going after Apple—the king of consumer hardware—makes perfect sense: either OpenAI builds the iPhone killer or forces Apple to make a move. They’ve won the web interface so far, but don’t own an OS or device layer, so this helps solve that long-term strategic gap. And since it’s an all-equity deal, there’s basically no downside—John stays aligned, and OpenAI now has elite software and hardware talent under one roof. Huge value unlock
Identical comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44056238
More like pickleball
Sam is playing 4D chess here. He needs top-tier talent and design to build the next generation of AI hardware, and this move pulls in both capital and talent. Going after Apple—the king of consumer hardware—makes perfect sense: either OpenAI builds the iPhone killer or forces Apple to make a move. They’ve won the web interface so far, but don’t own an OS or device layer, so this helps solve that long-term strategic gap. And since it’s an all-equity deal, there’s basically no downside—John stays aligned, and OpenAI now has elite software and hardware talent under one roof. Huge value unlock.
Identical comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44056251
The comments on this article are very interesting. The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone. This has so far not only been a complete failure, but is bound to be a complete failure in the end.
The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. AI lies at the core of everything it does. It's an AI assistant, a friend, another brain. It's not some BS summarizing engine that can't even do simple tasks like copy the name of a song playing on Spotify into Notes.
That's what I think Jony Ive envisions.
The reason why Apple has failed to integrate AI successfully into the iPhone isn't because we need an AI-first device, it's because AI is still universally being strategized as a solution in search of a problem. An AI-first device at this stage will fail for the same reason: it doesn't have a mission statement to solve particular problems for real people, it has a mission statement to be an AI device.
The absolute best case scenario for an AI-first device at this stage is that it ends up like the Vision Pro, which had a similar mission problem.
> The next major device will definitely be AI-first.
Be more specific though: what form factor will such a device be in?
A coffee maker? A phone? Glasses? Cars? A building?
The AI wave seems to be hoping a whole load of hardware revolutions, such as holographic displays, will just appear out of the ether because it fits with their vision of how things should be.
> The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch.
When's the last time something of this magnitude actually occurred in real life? Myself and many of the other commenters you refer to have a hard time believing something like this is even possible in the current market—the huge megacorps are more risk-averse and incapable of innovation than ever before, and the scrappy startups seem to exist entirely to be acquired by the megacorps to raise their valuations.
The last time something even remotely like this happened was, what, the Oculus Rift? And that was far from a perfect product that perfectly solved every problem in the domain perfectly on the first try.
This could be true... but only if there is an actual specific problem that they can put their finger on that requires the device to be AI-first. What is that problem exactly?
It's also not obvious to me that a concerted effort by Apple (unlike what we've seen so far, admittedly) wouldn't eventually be successful in converting the iPhone to something effectively indistinguishable from a platform designed from the ground up to be "AI-first".
Designing things from the ground up is hard by the way. It's not just the design itself; it's the ecosystems around them which are really hard to get going. Apple has the world's biggest flywheel in motion there already.
Hasn’t that already been done (and failed) with one or two devices? there was one about a year ago that was effectively a clip on your shirt and it seemed like a terrible product. It was meant to be a dedicated AI device.
This is where SesameAI seems to be heading. If you haven't yet, try the demo, it's definitely flawed at the moment but shows some potential for conversational UX.
The next major device will be AI first but not voice in voice out, but rather voice in text out (and images). I'm not sure they understand this and I'm not sure they could deliver anything which would surpass the iPhone.
iPhone should've been a successful formfactor, it's not the form factor that's the problem it's the lack of apple datacenters that can train and inference for a popular service. Instead Apple went all in on edge inference which as we all know is absolutely stupid and probably will never be that relevant.
I think it should make interfaces on the fly depending on what you want to do.
Taking sci-fi as a guide I think it should be robots.
> The next major device will definitely be AI-first.
Everything so far that has been named X First has been marketing woo woo, and in practice only meant "we're thinking about this use case a little more than before". Such as mobile-first, and cloud-first.
In either case, sure, it's very possible that device hardware will change. But in what way is hard to say. Will the on-device chips be more powerful to support local inference? Sure.
> Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone [...] is bound to be a complete failure in the end.
Yes, kind of. The problem with all existing platforms including web is that they're build in a way that is adversarial to interop. Apps are siloed, and the only possible birds-eyed view is the OS itself. But, GUIs are not built for machine interop. Vision models to navigate UI will be flaky at best for the foreseeable future (and forget about voice, it's an extra modality at best and is way too limited). On web frontend, it's the same story. On backend, the web has been adversarial for a long time, with fingerprinting, rate limiting, anti-scraping, paywalling etc, which has been supercharged in the last year or two.
Essentially, the products and systems we use every day are a poor fit for interop with AI, so I suspect we'll see two parallel futures: (1) interop and semantic GUIs being integrated into platforms, web and app ecosystems (this is what MCP is IIUC). This will fail for the same reasons as web 2.0 failed (the adversarial nature of tech business models - opening up APIs is not incentivized), not to mention the investment required to build a new OS and (2) vision models to do tasks on behalf of humans with some mediocre agent-loop-thing on top of existing hot garbage pool of already flaky apps and sites. This won't necessarily fail, but it will mean platform- and large data owners (Google, MS etc) will yet again end up on top, since they control the access to the birds-eye view (much like Siri or Google Assistant). It is also the most noisy, flaky and data-intensive surface area to use for interop, meaning the products will be slow, bloated and feel like bonzibuddy for years.
Doesn't mean AI won't transform businesses and white-collar work. It certainly already does. But, the AI selling point for consumers (current ability - not "future potential"), is kind of like how Google Search and Maps was a decade+ ago. Sure, it provides amazing utility, but most of the time you're looking at memes, playing games and watching TV shows. AI in those products is mostly a continuation of ongoing enshittification.
